Mobile Messaging - Musings and Such

MobileFlows will be at AD-TECH in the Mobile Marketing Zone

If you will be at AD-TECH on November 3rd and 4th in New York at the Javitz Center, come by and see us in the Mobile Marketing Zone.

MobileFlows and Mobile Messaging is a hit in Beantown

MobileFlows exhibited at the New England XPO for Business show at the Boston Convention & Exposition Center this week. This horizontal show is attended by small and mid-sized business professionals from throughout New England who are interested in services that can help their business grow. To be honest, we were not sure how this segment of the market would take to mobile messaging technology and if they would embrace it as our larger business clients have.  

It did not take long to see that this group is excited about how they can leverage mobile. At the booth, we demonstrated our campaign manager tool and we were setting up messaging campaigns in real time. Attendees would watch as we configured the keyword and the message. Then they joined in by texting the keyword from their phone to our shortcode and getting the response in seconds. A few looked bewildered as though they were trying to work out the magic. Others got very excited and asked how to move to the next step in obtaining the funtionality for their business.  

Small businesses are still the largest segment by far in the United States. We are looking forward to helping them implement mobile initiatives and leverage this exciting tool in their organizations.

MobileFlows is now fully compliant with T-Mobile 3PG

T-Mobile 3PG (Third Party Gateway) is a new billing platform for premium SMS billing. The changes involve an extended set of parameters to be sent to (or received from) T-Mobile as part of premium billing processes. 

Although adding support for 3PG is not a trivial task, most of our customers did not have to do anything and the changes were seamless and transparent. In other cases, customers only needed to make very minor changes as required.

The major benefits for providers is a more reliable billing process including a feature known as "two-phase" - in this scenario, T-Mobile ensures the end-user receives the content and the merchant receives the funds ... great idea, but to be honest, we are not so sure about how practical this feature is for many types of content and campaigns.

Other benefits include support for subscription refund management and supposed better support for pre-paid subscribers.

At the moment, 3PG changes are for premium campaigns only - however, we have reason to beleive these changes may impact standard rate campaigns in the future - something we think would be a big mistake and hopefully T-Mobile will come to their senses before making a final decision on this!

 

Ad-Tech creating some mobile marketing buzz

It appears that mobile marketing among Ad Agencies and the like is gaining steam. Good article about the MobileMix Zone at the Ad-
Tech show here... http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/associations/6061.html

Mobile Chat - Can you say huge?

MobileFlows introduced Mobile Chat Service this week. I must admit when we first looked into providing this service, I asked aloud, "Who would pay a premium fee to interact with a mobile chat service?" That was the wrong question. The right question is how many folks will pay a premium fee to interact with a mobile service? The answer is alot. Turns out many consumers love to chat on their mobile phone. We already have clients offering chat services through our platform and the initial numbers are impressive. So, if you looking to add a new revenue producing service through chat, contact us. We can walk you through how the messaging and billing piece works and introduce you to chat operators that allow you to access a turnkey operation integrating your content or idea.

At what point has it all gone too far...Part Deux

A simple, but pertinent example relates to the typical "disclosures" required in an SMS Text message - phrases such as "Text STOP to cancel" and "Msg&Data rates may apply", etc. We recently submitted a simple auto-responder SMS Text campaign - a simple message flow that involves a single MO (e.g. the user sends a keyword to the short-code), followed by a single MT (e.g. the service responds with a single SMS text message). The single MT message that is sent was required to include these "disclosure" statements. A typical SMS text message only supports 160 characters, and so when all the required "disclosure" statements were taken into account, we were left with about 90 characters for the actual message content! In other words, about 43% of the message text was carrier mandated "disclosures" - and all of this was required for a simple auto-responder! 160 characters is limiting enough, how much more so is only 90 characters ... how informative/valuable can your message be with only 90 characters?

One of the carrier mandated phrases that needed to be included in the MT was "Text STOP to cancel". Note that nothing is actually "cancelled" if the user sends STOP to the short-code because they have not opted into anything in the case of an auto-responder. Why does this phrase need to be included in the text for an auto-responder MT message? The normal argument put forward is that of "consistency" - the argument suggests that sending STOP is the mandated way to opt-out, e.g. from a subscription service, so to keep things consistent, support for STOP with an auto-responder makes sense. It has been our experience that the presence of the phrase "Text STOP to cancel" for an auto-responder actually confuses users who get concerned that they have opted-in to a service when that was not their expectation - so they actually text STOP to cancel, even though they had not opted into anything in the first place - surely this is not a good user experience?

Any thoughts?

 

At what point has it all gone too far?

MobileFlows is a strong supporter of the MMA US consumer best practices (see http://mmaglobal.com). It would be fair to say that these standards (and the additional various carrier specific requirements) make obtaining, and maintaining, a short-code in the USA somewhat "challenging".  These standards are monitored, predominantly through carrier audits, and failure to adhere to these standards can result in a short-code being shut-down.

MobileFlows strong commitment to these standards may have, on occasion, cost us in terms of lost business due to customers who do not share our commitment to these standards. However, by and large, we find that most companies want to do the right thing - even if they don't always understand or agree with the relevant standard. That is of course, a good thing, and MobileFlows service make adhering to these standards and guidelines very easy.

On balance these standards make for a better industry, and MobileFlows will always remain committed to supporting these standards. However, in the spirit of some healthy debate, the question becomes "at what point has it all gone too far"?

Read my next blog entry to learn what happens next... 

Welcome to MobileFlows

Today, Websnapme became MobileFlows. When we started this company over three years ago, we unveiled a very cool product that made it extremely easy to easily send anything from a web page to a mobile phone. The technology was and is still amazing and we still have plans to roll it out in the future. Snapping things from the web to mobile phones made Websnapme a perfect product name. Like many early stage businesses, we have grown and added new services over time. Our mobile messaging platform is now leveraged and used by companies throughout the world....and we thought....maybe we should change our service name to better reflect our place in the mobiel market. So today, we become MobileFlows, because that's what we do. We Make Mobile Flow!

Is MMS here yet?

I get that question alot from our mobile messaging customers. The truth is yes and no.

Most of the time, depending on the carrier, our platfrom sends rich media via either WAP Push or an SMS message with a link to the content. True MMS sent from a platform is something different. There is no link. There is nothing to click. The content just arrives. When you send a picture from your phone to a friend's phone, that is what the MMS experience looks like.  At MobileFlows, we built our platfrom from the outset to be optimized for MMS and to support the delivery of binary content. The problem is that the carriers have been slow to open this delivery method up to the aggregators. But now that seems to be changing. For example, mBlox has recently introduced a new MM7 Gateway and they now offer MMS service on the Verizon network. Other carriers are sure to follow. Other aggregators such as Sybase 365, Open Market are also rolling out MMS services through Verizon and the other major carriers.  

So....MMS is here in its truest form through some networks, but it is not here ubiquitously. The good news is, it's coming.

MMS - Fact or Fiction

I had to smile when I came across a website the other day where the headline "MMS is Here!" jumped off the page. The implication was that you could sign up with them and start delivering your mobile messaging campaigns via MMS to every phone in the new universe. I even had one of our partners call me and ask how they can do that?  A better question might have been, "How can they claim that?" Upon further examination of the service, it turned out that they claim to deliver binary messages (video, audio, images) not exactly as true MMS, but rather the old fashioned ways (via Wap Push and SMS links). They use the acronym of MMS to describe their platform and have the letters stand for something other than Multimedia Messaging Service. Too clever by half, I'd say.